As last man on earth, Will Forte needs his iPhone games
AUSTIN — Actor Will Forte was all over the recent South by Southwest festival, with a Twitter contest at a convention booth and on the show floor with a widely viewed panel. He was there to plug his new Fox TV series, Last Man on Earth, so we had to ask him the obvious question.
What's the one gadget he'd want with him if he were the last man on earth?
"Assuming all tech is still up and running?" he asked.
Yes, of course.
"It's going to sound kind of lame, but my iPhone. It's loaded up with all my favorite dumb little games, it gets me to the Internet, that's all I need."
Forte, the former Saturday Night Live troupe member, and star of the film MacGruber, is a major mobile game fiend who spends hours toiling away with mobile games.
His favorite is Drop Seven, a numbers game from Zynga.
"It's taken over my life. I give myself a marker — if I hit this, I won't play anymore. I hit them — but I keep playing."
He also likes 2048, another numbers puzzle, and has given up on Tiny Wings.
"I became a master, so I moved on from that."
He doesn't play games much on the set of his show. "It's when I get home, and I'm stressed out. It's a weird form of meditation. It probably stresses me out just as much to play. I have an addictive personality, especially when it comes to games. I try to establish a score, don't beat it, then won't stop until I get it."
In getting the gig to star in the Fox series, Forte was told how important Twitter would be for the life of the show. Fox launched the Twitter contest at SXSW, inviting folks to tweet what they'd want with them if they were the last folks on earth, and told Forte he had to start tweeting.
"I signed up for Twitter when it came out, and thought it was interesting, but didn't do much.
"The fun thing is to connect with people instantly, but it's also like the situation where you send out an office birthday card, and you can't think of what funny thing to write for your co-worker's birthday card. Now I'm forced to come up with something."
Luckily, he has the Fox gig. It's given him oodles of material to tweet about as @OrvilleIV. (His full name: Orville Willis Forte IV.)
If you read his tweets, you'll see that he is an endless, tireless promoter of the show, going as far as posting half-naked photos of himself to bring in viewers, labeling it a "sensual reminder."
Stuff like this brings out the occasional mean tweet, but he doesn't mind.
"I'll always favorite it," he says. "I don't care. I'm used to people being mean, every once in a while i'll send something back too."
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